Equal Justice Works

This past weekend I went to the Equal Justice Works Conference in Washington D.C.  Let me first say that I have not been to D.C. since the mid-1990s.  Much has changed, as you might imagine.  Of course, much is also still the same -- the judicial, the legislature, and the executive branches are all still there.  Related to all things law, the Equal Justice Works Conference is about helping law students find public interest jobs, and those jobs ranged from working with the EPA in Boston to working with the Alaska public defender to representing children at risk in Houston.  I was so proud of the students who have made the choice to forgo the lucrative law firm job and pursue a job where they serve others.  I am sick at the amount of money that some lawyers get paid for their minimal amount of work, and I am displeased with the focus of private law firms as the shining star of employment for post-graduation.  I was so pleased to see these students actively trying to find jobs that protect the environment, children, and abused peoples.  We definitely need more lawyers like them to help protect those in need and those often forgotten or abused by the system.

For more information on Equal Justice Works, see http://www.equaljusticeworks.org/.

Really fantastic quote

So, I've taken some time off from blogging. Given that almost no one reads my blog, I felt okay with this hiatus. I am going to try to be better, though, about staying on top of things and posting good legal tidbits. I'm also going to be expanding into writing tidbits because I'm now teaching Legal Writing at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Yes, that is what I've been doing. Essentially this means that I've been trying to figure out how to teach my students better than how I was taught and to meet them at their level. It's a learning process for us all.

One of the assignments I have my students do is read periodicals for good writing style. Initially, they liked it, and it has since become a burdensome task, which I have now changed to be less-frequent and more pointed such as "focus on topic sentences and determinative facts." This morning I read them a passage from Clea Koff's book The Bone Woman, which is about Koff's time as a young forensic anthropologist digging up mass graves in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. I thought I'd share this passage with you because it is so fantastic and moving. This particular passage is about her time in Croatia:

"To destroy a house is symbolic, especially in places like Croatia and Bosnia, where many people build their houses themselves, enlisting the aid of relatives or neighbors with skills in bricklaying or concrete and returning the favors later. The houses are usually built over a period of years, one complete floor at a time, while the family saves the money to built the next floor. Most neighborhoods have a fair number of houses with completed first and second floors, but maybe only the outer walls and roof of the third. To destroy what people have spend decades building, maybe even a lifetime, with the help of neighbors, and then to leave the neighbor's house standing, is a particular type of cruelty. The moment of destruction is intended to demoralize the owners and their families by sending a clear message: we undo your house, we erase your mark on the land. Don't come back, because you haven't enough lifetime left to start again.

Ahhhh . . . so powerful